A screeching halt.

For the record, I did not wake up two weeks ago and think to myself, "Hey, what if I posted a cryptic, vignette-y piece about a totally ancient dysfunctional relationship from my early twenties, and then just disappeared for awhile? ...Yeah, that's what I'll do! It'll be fun!"

What actually happened is that I found, as the time since my last post stretched from a few days to several to more than a week, was that there was just nothing to report. And not only that, but my inner monologue -- which often supplies my daily life with narrative bits and bobs that serve as the basis for posts -- had just sort of shut itself up. The steady stream of ready words had slowed to a trickle. Inside my head, things had gotten awfully quiet. And the days continued to pass.

...And then last week, I got an email from my 80-something year-old grandmother. It said "Happy birthday!"

And then it said, "I've been reading your blog!"


On the plus side, this certainly shook things up. The gears wrenched into motion, the floodgates opened, and my inner monologue sprang back into action and began shouting out words at a furious rate.

Unfortunately, all of those words were "AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHFUCKNOOOAAAGH."

Because shit. Can I even say that now? (On that topic, can I even say "shit"?!) I mean, you guys. My grandmother. Reading this blog -- you know, the one with the word "penis" in the title header and an entire series of posts about an in-window masturbator?

Yeah, THAT BLOG.

My mother, who knows just how to really bring home the terror when it comes to this sort of thing, told me, "You know, this means that she read your post about fornication."

Yep. It sure does! My dear, sweet grandmother! And not only that, grandma is probably reading this post, too. Talk about an elephant in the room.

...Not that I'm calling my grandmother an elephant! That is totally not what I meant! OH MY GOD THIS JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE.

So before I embarrass myself any further, I'm just going to leave it at this:

Hi, Grandma! Welcome. I hope you enjoy the blog. I'm sorry about the state of the place; if I'd known you were coming by, I never would have left all these expletives and dick jokes lying around.

And now if you'll all excuse me, I have to go find out whether it is, in fact, actually possible to die of embarrassment.

(For the record, I'm kind of hoping that the answer is yes.)

A meeting.

A warning:
This is an experimental departure from my usual fare. I'll probably delete it.
In the meantime, please be kind.

Update: Okay, it stays.

* * *

"You wanted me to tell her," he says, and I nearly spit out my beer.

* * *

We never really connect, only reconnect. Our relationship has always been marked by long absences. In the first year I knew him, back when every meeting meant a tangle of sheets and grappling hands and eventual exhaustion before the sun had even so much as begun to dip below the horizon, we saw each other only half a dozen times. Now, sometimes a year will pass between chats, or sometimes we'll play long games of text-tag and missed messages that eventually peter out, or we make vague plans only to cancel on each other.

And then, eventually, a day. A date. A restaurant and his bony frame in the doorway, cutting away a dark slice of midday sun.

I used to be fascinated by how little space he took up. He was bird-thin, fine-boned, and then he would fold up. He disappeared into corners. He sat cross-legged on chairs, like a child. Today, when I sat down across from him and watched him turn from me to look at the menu, there was gray in his hair.

* * *

"What did you do?"

I have a bandaid on my middle finger. Just across the way and up the road apiece from my wedding ring. Years ago, I would have extended the wounded digit across the table and let him touch it, and I would have made a bigger deal about how it had met its bloody fate under my own teeth.

But that was the problem, then. With us. With me.

I tell the truth today: that I was watching a rerun of Law & Order, that I got nervous about what was going to happen in the final courtroom scene, and that before I even realized it I'd eaten off my entire cuticle.

It's funny to me -- it is me, it's just the sort of thing I'd do -- but lines appear on his face, and he says, "Noooo."
And then, "You can do better than that."

And that was the problem.

* * *

I'm not better than that. I could be, in fits and starts. I was twenty-three years old, and every thirty-one days I could put on my best and brightest, giving him one day per month with the esoteric, intellectual, literary version of myself.

It's easy to believe that someone is extraordinary, when you've never seen her be ordinary.

We would intertwine our same-sized hands over tables while our smug salads wilted and the wine got warm, and he'd say something about Don DeLillo, and I'd smile and nod with the knowledge that he wouldn't be there tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, to see me reading a Wikipedia page with a beer in one hand and a box of Cheez-Its in the other. That by the time we next met, the subject would have changed.

That he had no idea how much I hate frisee.

That he didn't know me, even when he began to claim that he loved me.

It made me wonder about his girlfriend, the one he lived with. He would leave her behind to be with me, and I thought that she must have been something -- to hold his interest, day in, day out, at home. In their home.

I thought she must have been exhausted.

* * *

Now, we meet every once in awhile. We reconnect, somewhere between my happy prattling about my husband and his bits-and-pieces summarizing of a new girlfriend. ("She has red hair," he says, and then, "She climbed Kilimanjaro," as though one is a natural extension of other.)

"Did you ever meet my friend Mike?" he says.
I laugh, the way I always do when he asks me a question as though I'm a real ex-girlfriend, and not The Other Woman From Way-Back-When.

"Of course not," I say.
He looks confused.
"You don't introduce a girl to your friends when she's your dirty little secret."

There's a pause. A cry; I realize that there are babies in this bar. Two of them, tiny things with downy hair and heads that loll and coo against their mothers' shoulders. The sunlight presses hazily against the tabletops and their little eyes close tight.

"You wanted me to tell her," he says, and I nearly spit out my beer. I shake my head.
"No way."
"You did."
"Well, I didn't."

I take another drink.

"I'm sorry I didn't introduce you to my friends."

And another. There's foam in the glass. Spit, mostly.

"I didn't want to meet your friends."


He doesn't believe me, I don't think. I don't know.
I don't care.

My drink is gone, and so am I, and I don't think I'll see him again.

Legally boned.

I've only just realized this, and it disturbs me: Sometime in early August of 2008, I fornicated for what may have been the last time in my life.

Oh, did I mention that I was going to write about sex? Ha, whoops! Well, now you know!

But yeah, that happened. My last fornication passed unseen, unknown, like a silent ship in the night... or, I mean, not silent -- it was probably, you know, lots of grunting and zoo noises, but... well. That doesn't matter. What matters is that married persons, by definition, don't fornicate.

Nope, that's specifically for the unmarried. Once you've put a ring on it, you're just straight-up legal to throw it in there, and there's nothing anyone could do to stop you -- or would! You're allowed, even encouraged, to have sex! This is the apparent boon of marriage: that Jesus, conservative old people, and the Congress of the United States of America are all one-hundred percent on board with whatever it is you do behind closed doors and between the sheets. (Provided you don't try to put it anywhere untoward, of course, if you know what I'm saying. I can't speak for Jesus, but last I heard, they particularly disliked that sort of thing in Texas.)

Having watched every single motherloving last one the occasional episode of "Engaged and Underage", I know that the implicit permission to have sex is seen by some as a major incentive to get married. Those lust-hungry young couples who haven't quite closed the door on puberty yet, fleeing from their wedding reception with glee at finally being able to Get Busy with the Permission of God. Sometimes I watch these shows and cackle to myself, because they have NO IDEA what they're in for.

But here? Well, no. It's not like that. The fact that Jesus and his dad and my grandma are all totes cool with the bang-bang -- this does not make me want to leap into the sack.

There's the general lack of cachet of the whole thing, first off. Because c'mon -- what would you rather do? "Fornicate", or have "marital intercourse"? One of these things sounds awesome, like the sort of activity that might take place in a bar bathroom or an elevator, or under the buffet table at your friend's wedding with a cocktail napkin stuffed in your mouth to muffle the screams (what? No I didn't!), and the other sounds like an SAT word, one of the ones where you were too bored to remember the definition but you're pretty sure it has to do with small engine repair.

Dull.

But worse, I think, is that marital sex is totally de-naughtified. When even the Bible is all, "Hey, you, with the ring! Take your pants off!", the exciting sense that you're getting away with something is just... pffft. I'm starting to understand those previously-vanilla couples who show up on latenight HBO specials about sex parties or Vegas brothels, who turn to the camera and giggle, "We never used to do anything like this! But now, look! A dildo!"

Not that there are any problems over here, or anything -- if you were hoping I was going to be all, "So what I'm saying is, our sex life sucks", then I am sorry to disappoint you. (Also, what the hell. Why would you hope that?)

But I am distressed to realize that my last fornication for the foreseeable future passed without so much as a fare-thee-well, or a party hat, or anything.

...Or, I mean, there may have been a party hat. I drink a lot.

All over the place.

Today, I can be found here and here. A new column pubbed here last week. I filled out the staff questionnaire here. More freelance work is simmering in my head or just finished, held in the hands of editors and waiting to be served.

I'm starting to feel strangely settled, here in my apartment with no job -- no real job, anyway -- and the endless clicking of the keys, and the funny sensation of a narrative untangling itself in my head. I've started to recognize the different voices that echo in there. They're all me, but in versions. There's the typoed tumble that spills forth when I'm hurried; the shallow, stilted, plodding dryness when I haven't had enough to eat; the jittery delete-and-write-and-delete-and-write just after coffee; the slushy effusiveness and made-up words that pour out after I've had a beer at lunch. It's funny the way people will sometimes look at me when they ask what I do and I say, as though I'm not sure myself, "I'm a writer?"

I am?

I haven't lost that question mark at the end; I drown in words all day long, but when I step away from the keyboard and the sun goes down, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I try to explain about how it works right now, the unsureness of it. I'm waiting. I'm writing while I wait to find out whether or not I'm really a writer. Earlier today, I came across this photo of Roger Ebert (who you should be following on Twitter, if you're not, and whose story you should read about here, if you haven't); he's holding a newspaper, and the caption explains about writers and how they like to see their words made physical, because it feels permanent.

I don't know if "permanent" is the word I'd use. I'm dimly aware that this blog will exist forever, pretty much -- barring an apocalyptic event that wipes out the whole internet, or a decision on my part to delete it. (No, no, don't worry. I'll never.) But there is that unfinished feeling that online, it's all ether. Print might not feel permanent, but it's unequivocally real. It's there. The feel of paper, the smell of ink. It's got a life cycle all its own; your words come to life on the page, and later, they decay and disappear on the same. Sometimes it seems like writing online is so goddamn fetal, all these words floating unborn in the amnio.

Occasionally, I can see that someone has come here from their inbox -- Yahoo or Gmail or whatever -- and I know that something I wrote is being forwarded here and there, and it's like, wow. Vindication. Birth.

Congratulations, ma'am, it's a blog post.